ABSTRACT
What did Plato and Aristotle think was most important in life? What was this ‘wisdom’ which they focused on and what justifications did they offer to excuse this champion virtue? Plato's ‘Apology’ and Aristotle's ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ will serve as the key texts for this exploration of these two paragons of philosophy and their ideas on wisdom. This exploration of Plato and Aristotle's ideas will not, however, be primarily exegetical and both the areas in which these texts converge and where they differ will serve to give a more detailed picture of a plausible idea of wisdom. How do we come to understand what is right and wrong? Can there be lots of ways to be good and bad and at the same time a single sense of goodness which binds all good things? Both the humility of Socrates and the practicality of Aristotle's ideas will be crucial to a working theory of wisdom and we will find that wisdom itself is simultaneously simple in its sense of ‘goodness’ and complex in its lived application.
